The two cogs, named Varbergskoggen 1 and Varbergskoggen 2, were found at the former shoreline next to Varberg's medieval predecessor Getakärr. During the Middle Ages, Getakärr was a town in northern Halland, located immediately north of the current centre of Varberg, which is a city on the western coast of Sweden.
Workers at a quarry near Dungeness made the dramatic discovery of a rare Elizabethan-era shipwreck on the coast of Kent while dredging gravel for building materials out of a lake in April.
The location is now some 300 metres from the coast, but archaeologists believe that the site was once right on the coastline. The vessel could have been wrecked or abandoned on the former shoreline, and then gradually buried in sediment as time passed and the headland expanded.
The discoveries in the Baltic Sea are unprecedented and have revealed shipwrecks hundreds of years old. Two of them are with great certainty cargo vessels from the Netherlands, while the third and largest is supposed to be a Scandinavian vessel.
All three shipwrecks stand like ghost ships almost unscathed in total darkness on the seabed at a depth of approximately 150 meters and beyond the reach of modern fishing vessels.
In order to obtain the best footage, two Swedish photogrammetry experts Ingemar Lundgren and Fredrik Skorg from the company Ocean Discovery took part in the expedition. An underwater robot equipped with an advanced camera brought thousands of images to the surface and reproduces with great precision a virtual image of the wrecks as they actually appear.
The pictures are so detailed that you get the feeling of being able to walk around a ship that sank hundreds of years ago.
According to the archaeologists, despite the religious tensions in the area, the shipwreck demonstrates that commerce was still thriving since it carried products from all over the Mediterranean, including Cyprus, Egypt, Turkey, and the coast of North Africa.
It was around the time the largely Christian Byzantine Empire was in decline and had begun losing its grip on this eastern Mediterranean region while Islamic rule was extending its reach.
The survival of a vessel such as this is extremely rare, and there are no known wrecks of seagoing ships from the 11th to the 14th centuries in English waters. The discovery makes this the earliest English designated wreck site where hull remains can be seen, Bournemouth University writes.
The shipwreck was preserved due to unique environmental factors, according to maritime archaeologists now excavating and analyzing the site.
The shipwreck, which has been found to be about 375 years old, was found nearly 36 feet beneath the surface of the Trave River - a river in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, which flows into the Baltic Sea at Travemünde. The ship was found during routine measurements of the river by the local waterway and shipping authority which detected an anomaly at the river bottom using a multibeam echosounder.
“The wreck is made from oak, cut between 1233 and 1240, so nearly 800 years ago,” said Staffan von Arbin, a maritime archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg.
Last autumn, the University of Gothenburg conducted archaeological diving inspections along the coast of Bohuslän to find out more about known wrecks on the seafloor. It was during this work that the maritime archaeologists came upon the wreck outside of Fjällbacka, which has been given the name “Dyngökoggen.”
The Baltic Sea offers some very treacherous waters even under the best of circumstances. The price to pay for sailing the Baltic through the millenniums has been high, and traces of those costs are scattered over the bottom.
You could say that Richard Lundgren’s destiny was cast when his parents took the precocious, then eight-year-old Swedish schoolboy to visit the Vasa Museum in Stockholm.
